The latest 'Game of Thrones' episode is a reminder of the terrifying power of human crowds

If you watched the penultimate episode of "Game of Thrones" season six, something tells us you won't forget the "Battle of the Bastards" — that gruesome clash of armies between Jon Snow and Ramsey Bolton for the control of Winterfell.

The engagement was on an enormous scale we haven't seen since the Battle of the Black Water in season two, and it brought up a real-life risk that we don't normally see in sword-swinging fantasy battles: getting crushed and suffocated to death by a sea of people.

Jon's army, a ragtag force made up of Wildlings and a smattering of northern soldiers, were as bereft of numbers as they were discipline. Once Ramsey used Rickon Stark to lure Jon out of his strategic position, any hope for overcoming these deficiencies was lost. The Boltons locked shields and successfully carried out a pincer formation that trapped Jon's small army into a semi-circle of stabby death.

And with a flourish of House Bolton style, the trap was walled off by a growing pile of corpses. Jon barely made it out alive, but for awhile he was pinned under a suffocating pile of the dead and dying as the living stampeded over him.

Medieval battles may be no more, but the stressful, claustrophobic, and deadly nature of large groups of people are still very real.

Helen Sloan/HBO Lauren F. Friedman, a senior editor at Tech Insider, has written about the science of deadly crowds before in the wake of a devastating stampede in Mecca, which killed more than 700 people in 2015.

She reported that it takes the force of only seven panicked people to bend steel, according to Johns Hopkins' Edbert Hsu, who studies crowd-related deaths. Compare that to the crushing force of hundreds of armored soldiers, and you get an idea of how lucky Jon Snow was to escape death.

In addition to crushing forces, suffocation is an equally disastrous risk of a big crowds of people.

John Seabrook's 2011 New Yorker piece, "Crush Point," details this horror, as well as how terrifyingly quick crowds can go from fun to frightening:

"The transition from fraternal smooshing to suffocating pressure — a 'crowd crush' — often occurs almost imperceptibly; one doesn't realize what's happening until it's too late to escape ... At a certain point, you feel pressure on all sides of your body, and realize that you can't raise your arms. You are pulled off your feet, and welded into a block of people. The crowd force squeezes the air out of your lungs, and you struggle to take another breath."

Such devastating events are not freak occurrences, either. In a 2009 study, Hsu compiled a list of human stampedes from 1980 to 2007. The cost? At least 7,069 lives.

Hsu has actively lobbied international health organizations for the recognition of human stampedes as "an important type of disaster" and resources toward preventing them. But as our colleague Friedman puts it, troubling questions would remain in the face of increased awareness:

"Can massive, dense gatherings of people ever be truly safe? Or will people in such crowds have to learn to accept the risk that one wrong move can ripple with terrifying, sometimes deadly speed?"

The next time you're stuck in the midst of a surging crowd that's picking up steam, remember the plight of Jon Snow during the "Battle of the Bastards" and calmly make an exit. It just might save your life.